Discussion Topic

OK, here is a chance to start a real conversation with some right-wingers. It comes from this post by Matt Yglesias. It begins with a quote from former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, speaking at the CPAC conference:

“Mr. President, with bullies, might makes right. Strength makes them submit. We need to get tough on our enemies, not on our friends. And, Mr. President, stop apologizing for our country,” Pawlenty said in one of his speech’s biggest applause lines.

Matt continues, after a gratuitous music video from Nirvana:

This is interesting, in part, because I don’t even remember the president apologizing for our country.

OK, so, on the one hand you have Gov. Pawlenty saying that Pres. Obama needs to stop apologizing for our country (whatever that means). Then Matt makes the factually accurate statement that, in fact, Pres. Obama has never "apologized" for the United States (again, whatever that means). Matt continues, however, to offer a view that is not factual, but is his opinion. I am not suggesting I agree or disagree with it. These are Matt Yglesias words, not mine:

[R]age at the president’s non-existent habit of apologizing is a pure psychological manifestation of acute sensitivity around this issue. It’s a very pure distillation of the raw, hysterical, absurd atavistic nationalism that lies at the core of contemporary conservatism.

Matt extends his argument:

I mean, I assume Pawlenty doesn’t raise his kids to never apologize for their conduct. Apologizing is the right way to respond to wrongdoing. Sometimes I make factual errors in my posts and I try to apologize for them. I stepped on a woman’s foot by accident yesterday and apologized. That’s life. You apologize. Is it seriously an article of faith of the American conservative movement that the American government has never done anything worth apologizing for? That’s the official view of the political movement that allegedly thinks the other movement is too statist? When I heard that tear gas that Egyptian police fired at protestors in Tahrir Square was made in America and purchased with my tax dollars, I felt kind of sorry. But evidently real rightwingers are devoid of human compassion or any ethic of responsibility.

It is a fact that Pres. Obama has never, to the knowledge of anyone, "apologized" for actions the United States has carried out. Yet, he is constantly criticized for doing something he has not, in fact done. That's part (a). Part (b) is the description of right-wing ideology that sees nothing in America's history or current activity around the globe worth apologizing for. Obviously, we have much to apologize for.

In order to cover my self, I googled "Obama apologizes" and I got this hit right at the get-go:

President Obama this afternoon spoke with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom to “express his deep regret” and “extend an apology to all those infected” following the revelation that the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study from 1946 to 1948 in which near 700 prisoners, soldiers and patients with emotional and mental problems were purposefully infected with syphilis.

So, OK, he did apologize. Seems to me, though, this is kind of a big deal, purposely infecting people with a horrid disease without their knowledge or consent. So, he has apologized, but for a specific act that is, by any measure, reprehensible.

An April, 2009 Telegraph article on a speech by President Obama is characterized, perhaps not unjustly, as an apology for American arrogance by at least one blogger.

Beyond that, all I get are links to the Wall Street Journal and Rush Limbaugh claiming Obama is on another "apology tour", as well as instances where the President has apologized for words or actions that, it seems to me, warrant at the very least a public apology.

So, there you have it. The President has apologized, directly and forcefully, for a despicable act on the part of Americans in the past. He has also, obliquely perhaps, apologized for American arrogance and dismissal of European unity, while in the same breath calling on Europeans to be a bit more magnanimous toward America.

So, where are the apology tours? Other than these instances, when has the President gone on an "apology tour"? Should the President stop something he never actually started?

"All horizons are open"

As I watched the celebrations, the tumult, the joy in Egypt yesterday, one long-time activist for democracy in Egypt was being interviewed by Al Jazeera. Trying to capture her feeling at this particular moment, the above quote summed up not only her own sense of possibility, but my own sense that what has been happening across North Africa and the Middle East over the past six or so weeks is more than just rearranging the same old pieces on the chess board. With Yemen's long time autocrat vowing neither he nor his son will run for President in upcoming elections; with Jordan's King Abdullah II accepting protesters' demands that the government be replaced; with protests from Mauritania in the far west to under-the-radar YouTube postings from Saudi Arabia have shown, this may well be the beginning of a complete alteration of the nature of political life in the large swath of the Muslim world.

This was already on my mind from hearing this interview last week on NPR. Today, this article was offered up on Al Jazeera's English-language website.

The Egyptian revolution, itself influenced by the Tunisian uprising, has resurrected a new sense of pan-Arabism based on the struggle for social justice and freedom. The overwhelming support for the Egyptian revolutionaries across the Arab world reflects a sense of unity in the rejection of tyrannical, or at least authoritarian, leaders, corruption and the rule of a small financial and political elite.

--snip--

We are now witnessing the emergence of a movement for democracy that transcends narrow nationalism or even pan-Arab nationalism and which embraces universal human values that echo from north to south and east to west.

This is not to say that there is no anti-imperialist element within the current movement. But the protests in Egypt and elsewhere promote a deeper understanding of human emancipation, which forms the real basis for freedom from both repression and foreign domination.

The whole article deserves to be read, but this central reality - the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and nascent stirrings in other countries are about people seeking to define their nations, their realities, for the very first time - it seems to me is the only way to read events. Even should the revolutions be betrayed in the near or more distant future, they were sparked and made successful by the people of Tunisia and Egypt standing up for the first time and demanding to be heard as the people of Tunisia and Egypt.

While They Cheer In Tahrir

Reuter's Photo from Tahrir Square moments after announcement

I feel a bit of disappointment that I am not in a position - say, DC, where I could go to the Egyptian embassy, let alone in Cairo or Alexandria or Suez - to celebrate with the Egyptian people. The days ahead present all sorts of questions and difficulties, but for the moment, like Pres. Obama in his statement just a few minutes ago, it is enough to praise the people of Egypt for taking hold of their right to guide their destiny as they see fit. Gone are the nonsensical claims of "the Arab exception", ousted VP Omar Suleiman's claim that the Egyptian people aren't ready for democracy, that universal rights aren't actually universal. For now, it is enough to watch in awe as the people in Egypt celebrate their victory.

I am curious, though. Where have all the defenders of real freedom been? With two exceptions, the silence has been deafening. Exception number 1. Exception number 2.

The second, just posted, asks questions that need to be considered over the coming days and weeks and months, albeit set in a framework with which I happen to disagree. All the same, it, and the first as well, offer thoughtful takes on events in Egypt, free of cant and, worse, bigotry, that should be commended.

I still wonder, though. We've been hearing that the left is the enemy of freedom, yet I, as a lefty kind of guy, have been celebrating the end of a dictatorship. Where are all the friends of freedom?

The sound of the crickets keeps drowning out my question . . .

It Is Done

I was starting to write a post on the uncertainty in Egypt when I was rudely interrupted by a terse statement from Vice President Suleiman announcing that Pres. Mubarak has stepped down, and turned rule over to the Army. While this is only a beginning, the eruption in Tahrir Square is a thing of beauty to any and all who have been following events for the past three weeks.

For now, it is enough to celebrate with the people of Egypt. He has gone. It's over.

I know it says, "girl", but you know what, who cares?

Some Thoughts On Marriage

I've been doing a little back and forth on matters related to marriage, human sexuality, and the role of the Christian churches at this post. A point I made early on is that the Christian churches in America have, by and large, forfeited any coherent, Biblical approach to matters relating to marriage and the dynamics of human interpersonal relationships generally; taking a punitive approach, for instance, to the fruits of out-of-wedlock sexuality (i.e., not blessing a child born out of wedlock within the congregation), absent any evidence of a coherent approach to larger matters is not only mean-spirited and lacking in grace. It is just further evidence that, particularly in those quarters who hold up the Bible and insist we are to live by it, the churches really have no clue.

It seems fitting, then, that today's office reading is from the Gospel of St. Mark, the first sixteen verses of chapter 10, in which Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees regarding the Mosaic law concerning marriage and divorce. These verses, ripped apart and put back together again, Frankenstein-like, have been used for everything from hating on gays to punishing women for adulterous behavior, even though Jesus does happen to mention men, too. Rather than creative exegesis, let's just look at the questions and Jesus' answers.

Jesus is asked about the particular legal codes regarding marriage and divorce. He asks the Pharisees if they know what they are, to which they give a nice, summary answer. Jesus' response is quite simple - the Law is wrong. When a man and a woman marry, it isn't about feeling all warm and gooey inside; it isn't about getting tax benefits; it isn't because they are soul-mates whose lives are forever, inextricably intertwined. Nope, a man and a woman, joined in marriage are so joined by God. As to the why's and wherefore's, Jesus offers not a clue. Simply put, all Jesus is saying here is that, once folks get married, they are changed. They are no longer two people, but joined together - again, he doesn't explain it, he just says "they are one flesh" - they are something altogether different.

A careful reader would be forgiven for thinking he is showing the way marriage is related to the life of the Christian, a new creation in the risen Christ. This is, quite simply put, one of many proleptic passages in which Jesus offers a view of the resurrection and the life awaiting us. Reading this as a marriage manual absent this context - sharing in the life of the resurrected Jesus - is only getting part of the story.

Sad to say, our churches, whether mainstream or marginal, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, however one wishes to describe them, are incoherent on matters relating to marriage because they start talking about marriage rather than talking about the resurrection of Jesus. They start talking about family rather than talking about the resurrection of Jesus. They start talking about human relationships before they start talking about the resurrection of Jesus. In this passage, Jesus is offering us a whole new way of thinking about and talking about marriage, one rooted in his own life and passion and resurrection.

It might be nice if our churches started talking about marriage in the way Jesus is talking about it here. It might be nice if the churches started talking about marriage in any way other than the way they currently talk about it. It would be nice if we began any discussion on matters of human relationships talking about Jesus, crucified and risen, rather than talking about other stuff first. Our incoherence on matters regarding marriage, the family, sex, and an abundance of other matters falter because he have an agenda that keeps us from talking, first and foremost, about Jesus crucified and risen.

Random Humpy Music, Get Ur Freak On Edition

I got thinking about the role of music as a soundtrack to two not-necessarily-related human activities - love and sex. Ahead of next week's celebration of all things romantic, I thought it might be fun to consider the more carnal aspects of human relationships, and how they are reflected in popular song. Humans have always celebrated sexual intimacy in song; the poetry of Sappho, existing only in fragments, is perhaps three thousand years old. The Song of Songs in the Bible may be nearly as old. Indian songs and sex manuals and even carvings adorn the subcontinent. Only in the past couple hundred years, particularly in America and Britain, has there been any effort to pretend that human sexuality isn't a fit subject for the aural arts.

Here in the US, our folk music traditions, most especially the blues, celebrate sex in ways that are both humorous and deeply human. The old blues standard, "He's My Handyman" is the marvelous celebration by a woman of her man's sexual prowess. Even older tunes like "Diggin' My Potatoes" are even more carnal.

Rhythm and blues, rock, and rap continue this trend. Apart from the explicit songs, like "Get Low", or W.A.S.P.'s "Animal", there are songs like Charlies Rich's "Behind Closed Doors", The Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" (I love this one in particular because, as a child, this homage to the female orgasm was played all over AM radio; I am embarrassed to admit that one of my sisters had to tell me what the song was about; hey, I wasn't eleven years old!), and The Doors' "Love Me Two Times" were glorifications of sex that got all sorts of airplay.

The hard rock bands of the 1980's were a bit more open. For example, Whitesnake's "Slide It In" and The Bullet Boys' "Smooth Up In Ya". managed to get their message across pretty clearly.

The Christian churches have had a devilish time dealing with the celebration of sex in popular song. From the Middle Ages right up to the latest rap hit, the first response has been to shush the singer, and condemn the listeners. Except we human beings are a marvelous, complex animal, and sex happens to be an important part of human life. Celebrating sex is celebrating being alive, being human. Take some time before you get all smarmy and mushy next Tuesday and listen to a tune or two that revels in all the sweaty goodness of being human together.

OK, enough of that before I get all hot and bothered. Let's see what "random" offers up, shall we?

China Cat Sunflower - The Dead, May 4, 2009 Allstate Arena, Chicago, IL
Dear Father - Yes
I'll Take New York - Tom Waits
Melrose Avenue - California Guitar Trio
Symphony #5, 4th Movement - Ludwig van Beethoven
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed - The Allman Brothers Band
Treat You Right - Bob Marley
Sehnsucht - Rammstein
So Legt Ihn in Die Blumen, Lazarus Oratorio - Franz Schubert
Boplicity - Miles Davis

Oh, why not? Cheesy, way too much hair, but, heck, it's fun, right?

Dumb-Struck

This is not the Death Star, but Saturn's moon, Mimas.

My undergraduate alma mater, Alfred University, rests quietly in a spot best described as "the middle of nowhere". Small, almost the poster child for small western New York universities and colleges, it boasts among its many distinctions, the inventor of the air hockey table. One of the physics professors there, the late John Stull, created it as a lab tool for experimenting with zero-friction. For some reason, a toy company got wind of it and wanted to buy Stull's patent. Because he was a Ph.D., had a really good lawyer, or both, Stull refused to sell his patent. Instead, he licensed it, including a share of the profits. He became a wealthy man.

One of the things he did with that money was build a four-telescope observatory near the top of one of the hills just south of campus. Because it sits, as I say, in the middle of nowhere, it is uniquely suited for astronomical observation. The University offered, as a general science elective to fulfill basic liberal arts requirements, a four-credit astronomy lab. Running from eight pm until midnight one night a week, "astro lab", as it was known, was popular, among other reasons, because, locked in the top of the observatory with one or two partners was a marvelous opportunity to sneak in some weed or beer, and blow one's mind even as one checked out the wonders of the universe (not that I ever did either, I think to the frustration of my lab partner, a sophomore and sister at one of Alfred's three sororities).

The first time you put your eye to a real telescope like this, it can be quite mind-blowing. After siting it and orienting it - you find your way in the night sky by using co-ordinates known as right-ascension and declination, two of the few terms I have carried with me for all these years - you can find pretty much anything. The thing is, though, very often the patch of sky toward which the telescope may point will appear quite blank, a big black patch. You put your eye to the 'scope, and . . . you see stars. Maybe even hundreds. You might be looking at one of the small globular clusters that circle our galaxy, say, or perhaps a well-known but otherwise invisible star or double-star system. The Crab Nebula, always a favorite of mine, is beautiful through a telescope.

A prize possession of mine is a National Geographic Magazine from 1981 that featured an article with pictures of the Voyager I fly-by of Saturn. For some reason I still can't really understand, I was entranced by both the images and the accompanying story, the way the pictures puzzled astronomers, to the point that some of the images seemed to suggest many of the theories regarding orbital mechanics were obviously wrong. In the winter of 1991, I happened to find this very same magazine in a pile of books in an antique mall in rural Maryland. I picked it up for two bucks, and it sits on my book shelf to this day.

Yesterday, a friend of mine on Facebook linked to this site that offers one of those telescoping perspective shots in a series of photographs. Starting with the earth/moon system, we move ever outward until we encounter a mega-galaxy thirteen billion light years distant. One need hardly go that far through the series of photographs, however, to have one's mind blown. The photo showing Rigel and Aldebaran, two nearby stars in our galaxy, swallowing up not just our sun, but the entire solar system is enough to make you stop and wonder.

Our grasp of these things is, I would wager, minimal. Consider, as a fer-instance, the conflict over the Palestinian territories in the Middle East. The total size of the West Bank and Gaza strip is 6,020 square kilometers. For scale, my current state of residence, Illinois, is over 55,000 square miles. Indeed, our smallest state, Hawaii, at just over 6400 square miles, is larger than the Palestinian territories. Much of that region of our world is transfixed by a couple parcels of land that, together, are smaller than the smallest state in the US, could, in fact, disappear quite nicely as a county or two in one of the larger states of the union.

This is not to suggest that size equals importance, or that the conflict over Palestine, or in any other region of the world needs to be set aside. Rather, it is only to suggest that our perspectives on cosmic distances is limited by our experience of terrestrial distance. My commute to work is about as long as a drive from Jerusalem to the northern border of Israel with Lebanon, another hot spot. I drive it without thinking too much other than the country roads I take offer a bit of peace and quiet. Looking at the photo of Betelgeuse swallowing up Aldebaran, rendering our solar system invisible in the process, is literally impossible to grasp in any but the most superficial way. We have nothing in our collective experience with which to compare these images. All we can do is sit, a bit slack-jawed, and be silent.

When we speak of "creation" as a theological concept, it is always a nice idea to have access to stuff like this series of photograph. It keeps us from being too parochial in our concerns, too limited in our perspective, too small in our thinking. It might even encourage some people to shut up and just consider what their eyes cannot behold on a clear night sky.

Makes You Wish The Dust Speck Was Boiled

Former Dr. Seuss character John Bolton insists, among other things, that he is no duck.

"I'm not like the duck, placid on the top of the water and paddling furiously underneath. I'm really looking at it. It's a hard decision for me."

By all means, John. Run. I don't want to have downloaded that picture for nothing.

Have Attorney Will Travel

It isn't just Switzerland.

Human rights groups have vowed to track George W Bush round the world after their success in forcing him to cancel a trip to Switzerland amid concerns over protests and a threatened arrest warrant.

Katherine Gallagher, a lawyer with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, said: "The reach of the convention against torture is wide. This case is prepared and will be waiting for him wherever he travels next.

"Torturers, even if they are former presidents of the United States, must be held to account and prosecuted."

Although Bush has travelled freely round the world since leaving the White House in January 2009, human rights groups believe he is vulnerable to prosecution after admitting in his autobiography last November that he authorised waterboarding and other interrogation techniques.

"Waterboarding is torture, and Bush has admitted, without any sign of remorse, that he approved its use," said Gallagher, who is also vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights.

I look forward to George taking up the burden of personal responsibility, traveling to Spain or some other country that hasn't looked kindly on foreign heads-of-state torturing and killing people, allowing himself to be arrested, and appearing in court to defend his actions.

I hope he calls Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney as character witnesses. That would save the prosecutors a lot of time.

Freedom Is Hard (UPDATE)

As I write this, Pres. Hosni Mubarak has left the leadership of the National Democratic Party in Egypt, I'm listening to a discussion from a couple days ago on Al Jazeera with Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the possibility of popular democracy in Egypt, and in the back of my mind is this interview I heard a couple days ago on Here and Now on the wider post-colonial revolution in the Arab world. Here in the US, there is so much fear-mongering regarding events in Egypt - Media Matters for America, to cite just one example, has a rundown of snake oil salesman Glen Beck offering the oddest collection of conspiracies responsible for the unrest in the Middle East - that the birthing of democracy in Egypt is raising all sorts of questions regarding its health here in the US. In particular, the key to our freedom, the freedom to speak one's mind without fear, has become the most hated freedom we have. The reaction to those who find distasteful Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the one hand and Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald on the other hand - their ideological opponents want them silenced as a danger to the Republic - is, perhaps, the most insidious, anti-democratic, anti-American idea imaginable.

It is clear enough, at least to those who have been following the story in Egypt on Al Jazeera, that conspiracy theories are not only an American phenomenon. The Egyptian people are eager to express fears of all kinds of conspiracies. It isn't the content of these expressions that worries me, any more than the content of FOXNews, or Rush Limbaugh's radio show, or even the occasionally sloppy, lazy mainstream journalism one finds too often here in the US. What worries me is the refusal to accept that, yes, there are people who think differently than we do. There are people who are fundamentalist Christians, and Muslims, and Mormon and Marxist, and libertarians who have political beliefs and want to have their voice heard. In Egypt, moving forward, we have the prospect of secular political views, of leftist views, of moderately sectarian Muslim views, and others - all of whom will want a voice in the governance of a new, emergent democratic Egypt. The key to a healthy polity isn't silencing those voices we don't like.

The key to a healthy polity is, first and foremost, accepting that there are all sorts of people, including people who have ideas very different from one's own. One does not have to accept the legitimacy of those ideas. The other part of this equation is the willingness to treat the ideas of others - yes, even the kooky ideas of Glenn Beck - with enough seriousness, at the very least, to laugh at them. More serious views should be treated with the seriousness they deserve.

All this occurred to me with regard to the fear-mongering in this country regarding The Muslim Brotherhood, which is little more than a moderately conservative Islamic party with deep roots in the history of Egypt. It is, in fact, little different from the current ruling party in Turkey, which we were told was going to go the way of Iran, but is as committed to Turkey's history of secular governance as any other party. It is little different from various conservative Christian groups in the US who seek to voice their views in the public sphere of the US. I may not agree with their view; I might not even like them. All the same, I am grateful for them, and would rather they were heard than shouted down by those who quite simply cannot tolerate views different from their own. Encouraging the development of this kind of social and civic infrastructure in Egypt means breathing life back in to it here in the United States.

UPDATE: This article is really, really good. It covers some of the same territory, not least the cluelessness of so many outsiders (including myself!) to the complex dynamics under way in Egypt.

The Music Must Change

For all his intelligence and insight, David Hajdu falls in to an all too familiar trap. In a section of Heroes and Villains in which he discusses the perils and possibilities of aging pop and jazz stars - Elvis Costello, Sting, Abbey Lincoln - he takes a moment to take an a cliched swipe at the alleged pretensions of late-60's, early-70's British progressive rock, getting his facts wrong in the process of arguing from a perspective of alleged authenticity. Neither Genesis nor King Crimson released any albums made with orchestras. Genesis only made one concept piece, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Yes, Rick Wakeman did wear a pointy hat and flowing, spangled cape, perform with a full orchestra for his solo album Journey to the Center of the Earth, and bands like Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, and Van Der Graf Generator sought in earlier musical styles and forms ways to enliven their music, keep it interesting to themselves as musicians and their audiences.

Emerging in the very late 1960's, in the wake of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Moody Blues Days of Future Past, progressive rock coalesced as a general term form a small group of (mostly English) bands who combined a certain technical ability, musical knowledge, and adventurous spirit, wondering if it was possible to make of the popular music of the day - rock and roll, which, as Yes bassist Chris Squire said, really means Elvis Presley; and rock, which emerged with Bob Dylan turning on amplifiers and adding The Band as his backup, followed by imitators from The Byrds and The Rascals to the San Francisco sound - something more than just blues changes and screeching guitars. This is not to say there is anything wrong with blues-based rock, or the blues in general. On the contrary, one blues-based band, Led Zepellin, also incorporated elements associated with "prog" as it was known, in many of their songs, cheek by jowl with the blues (Zepellin also incorporated elements from non-Western, particularly Moroccan music, heard on "Kashmir"; Robert Fripp of King Crimson would investigate and incorporate Indonesian gamelan during the period he was away from active recording and performing in the late 1970's, incorporating it in to later King Crimson music).

The existence of prog, and its on-going presence as prog merged with heavy metal, and related styles like jazz fusion - from The Mahavishnu Orchestra to the various Canterbury bands like Soft Machine and Matching Mole - is usually dismissed as self-indulgence, or, what's worse, surrendering the primal rebelliousness of rock, rooted in an adolescent celebration of bare-bones minimalist aesthetic and technique in a quest to make the music less angry, less primal, and (let's face it) less black. These criticisms all fail for me for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is the question begged by those who, as Hajdu does in his ignorant dismissal of the pretentiousness of some of the worst of prog, is, why not do this musical exploration?

Who says rock has to sound like Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones? Who says that the 12-bar blues is the only authentic rock form? If a musician with an ear for classical guitar - Steve Hackett from Genesis, say - or jazz - Robert Fripp, Bill Bruford, Alan Holdsworth - want to take certain elements from those musical styles and incorporate them in a rock setting, why not? The results could be bad; anyone listening to the attempts at group improvisation King Crimson tried during their 1972-1974 incarnation could conclude pretty easily that the attempt fails far more than it succeeds. On the other hand, group improv that results in song structure - again, the bulk of King Crimson's early 1970's recorded output was little more than refined jams with a lyrical pastiche - could be both beautiful and ear-shattering (Fripp considered this edition of Crimson to be little more than a heavy metal band, and songs like "Lark's Tongue in Aspic, Part II", "Red", and "Fracture" are, indeed, heavy metal).

Hajdu, in particular, insists as do many other critics that rock and roll, as it emerged in the 1950's as a part of adolescent rebellion, is most clearly rock and roll when it sticks to its roots in adolescence and adolescents. There is a certain amount of truth to that. The success, in England, of punk as an indigenous musical and social rebellion against the overbearing conformity of Britain's class system and the overweening presence of bands as diverse as Pink Floyd, Led Zepellin, and the Rolling Stones who had become far too big, far too unwieldy, and far too expensive to see live testifies to the power of music-based revolt. Yet, for all the punk succeeded, to a certain extent at least in Britain, and was much adored by rock critics in America (one reads Lester Bangs' articles on the early Clash as one reads someone's love notes from high school, with a smile on one's face and a shake of the head at wearing one's heart on one's sleeve like that), it really didn't change anything. Indeed, reaching back behind not only prog and the blues revival in Britain, but even the Beatles by imitating 12-bar, three-chord blues changes, played at high volume and very fast, one could argue it was not so much a revolution against an overly-bourgeois music, but a reaction, a kind of Heideggerian overcoming of modernity that sought not so much the future but Jung's and Heidegger's primordial past. It's primitivism - one can still hear it in bands today, like The White Stripes who sound barely competent on their instruments, and early records from Green Day who do little more than strum or beat their instruments as loud and fast as they can, screaming out their insecurities because that was the only way to be heard over the amplified din - is part of its allure. Yet, it is a primitivism that is rooted in a false yearning for a golden age that never was.

As Hajdu also points out, those early rock and rollers didn't want to rebel. Chuck Berry was a country-western musician who also liked the standards. Elvis Presley wanted to be a crooner like Perry Como. They fell in to the music more out of lack of opportunity than anything else, due to racism and class bias. The music that emerged, for all its edginess and novelty, bore signs of thoughtfulness rather than thoughtless emoting. While teenagers may have embraced it not least because of its novelty, for those initial performers, it was just a stage along a journey in a career they all hoped would be long and varied. Berry's career was long, but not all that varied. Presley's career was shorter, a bit more varied, but he was constantly harassed by critics, and his manager Col. Tom Parker attacked as a svengali, for giving Elvis exactly the career he wanted - a lounge singer cum movie star.

Yet, even granting these realities, we are to reject what emerged in the wake of the musical experimentation of the late-1960's because it refused to stand still and accept iron-clad rules set down, for the most part, by non-musicians. Now, it is certainly true, as even Rick Wakeman acknowledges, that the music didn't always work and the musicians were occasionally, in his word, "pompous". One need only listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's live album to understand that reality. Then again, every musical style has its duds and flops, its failures, those who take two steps past the point where experimentation becomes true self-indulgence. Hell, even the Beatles flopped - The Magical Mystery Tour ring a bell?

At the end of the day, no musical style really needs a defense against critics. If musicians are honest in their appreciation and use of it; if audiences respond positively to it; if it offers to both musicians and audience something more, some aesthetic experience that is complete - it works. No one, not least the musicians who performed it, would ever argue that Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother was a rock and roll album.

That doesn't make it bad, or evil, or unmusical.

It just makes it what it is.

Cultural Criticism (UPDATE, UPDATE II Erratum)

As a welcome escape from the Egyptian situation - I am still following it via Al Jazeera - I have been re-reading my "move" book, the award-winning Heroes and Villains by David Hajdu. A collection of essays all but one of which were previously published in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic, among other publications, these essays cover the gamut - jazz and hip-hop, the blues and Sting, The Beatles and Susannah McCorkle, Elmer Fudd and graphic novels - of pop- and high-culture phenomena. The one previously unpublished essay, which opens the volume, is a review of the importance of the life and career of Billy Eckstine. Once the most popular singer in America - he outdrew Frank Sinatra and was offered a $1 million contract by MGM for both movies and recordings; his first band as a leader included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, names one might recognize - Eckstine's career came to a screeching halt when a photographer for Life magazine snapped one photo of a group of young women swooning over Eckstine, one leaning against his expansive chest as he laughed in seeming revelry at the event. The problem, sad to say, was the photo was taken in 1950. Eckstine was African-American. The young women in obvious physical desire, were white.

Hajdu's eclectic mix of the best - Lennon and McCartney each get separate essays; Ray Charles is remembered, as is his contemporary Bobby Darin - the worst - Alan Lomax, Sting, ignorant (mostly white) blues fans who focus on technical virtuosity at the expense of the totality of the musical experience - and the just-plain-odd - an appreciative essay on Elmer Fudd reveals that, in fact, Fudd was not voiced by Mel Blanc, among other glorious tidbits - is a rare gem among volumes of critical writing. Unlike Lester Bangs' gonzo-journalism-cum-narcissism (every essay of Bangs, no matter how brilliant, is far more about Lester Bangs than his purported subject matter), or Gary Giddin's insiders approach to writing about jazz, Hajdu writes for those who may never have heard, say, an Anita O'Day record, or truly appreciated the artistry of hip-hop artist/actor Mos Def, yet allows them access. He does not treat the reader like an idiot. Nor does he toss off phrases and jargonish nonsense that might make the reader feel like an adept of some secret world open only to those who truly understand.

As I read through these essays for the second time in six months, I have been thinking about the lack of serious critical acumen in the Church. One thing I will say for Wesley Theological Seminary, they had an actual Ph. D. in sociology on the faculty, who also happened to be a United Methodist clergyman. I wish even the introductory class in Sociology of Religion had been required of all M. Div. students, instead of those just in the Urban Ministry track. I was fortunate to take it, and continue to benefit from it, as I have moved with Lisa from south to north, from rural to more suburban churches.

All the same, some instruction in larger cultural concerns might also benefit our clergy. Wesley also houses the Center For Arts and Religion, and there is a strong emphasis on the role of the visual and graphic arts in the life of the local church. Classes in hymnody, however, are electives; one late professor, Jim Logan, used to begin his classes on Methodist History and Doctrine by playing a Charles Wesley hymn, integrating it in to his lecture for that day.

These, however, offered such a narrow scope for understanding the place of music and the other arts in the life of the local congregation. There was no introduction to critical writing, no entry for our clergy-in-training to learn to think critically about the culture in which the Church lives, and for which it lives. Seminary graduates escape after three or four years grasping in some general outline everything from liturgical practice to the classic doctrines of the church to an outline of its history; what they do not have when they leave are the tools to look at the larger world and understand it, come to grips with it, perhaps even see within its various cultural guises hints and possibilities of the blowing of the Spirit in song and poetry, in literature and art (there was a class on protest in African-American fiction, but the professor who taught that has long since passed away).

Since my own interests lie in music, I think Hadju's volume, with its breadth of subject matter and depth of understanding, even as he occasionally lapses in to cliche - John Lennon-good/Paul McCartney - bad is his most egregious one - seems as good a place as any to begin to understand the possibilities for the Church if it had even a few folks who would approach cultural criticism from the unique perspective of the Christian faith. For example, what are we to make of the varied music of U2, The Alarm, The Call, P.O.D., and Lifehouse? Would it be possible to integrate, say, the moral lessons of Dostoevsky and Alice Walker in to a way of looking at the larger world? Is it even possible to take the pessimism of Jonathan Franzen and the exuberance of David Foster Wallace as different poles as we move toward acceptance of our diminished national status, as well as the diminished role of faith in our national life?

Sadly, I just don't know if there are enough folks out there who understand how necessary this is to doing good ministry. We cannot serve a congregation if we do not have the tools to help them grasp the world around them. If we don't have those tools, we cannot pass them on.

UPDATE: Courtesy of (who else?) The New Inquiry comes this wonderful example of critical writing. What makes it wonderful? Why, by taking on the cliches of a critic pretending profundity. The DJ who created Girl Talk - as evidenced, at least, by the video TNI produces so helpfully - is certainly clever. Beyond that . . . is the clever use of technology a technique the way, say, learning a musical instrument or singing is a technique? At this point, I would have to say . . . well, read the review at Riff Market.

UPDATE II: Speaking of writing well about culture . . . I have corrected an error. Above, I referred to the band Lifehouse as "Lighthouse", for God only knows what reason. I regret the error, especially as I was pleading for more intelligent writing about culture. Ah, well, physician heal thyself and all that . . .

I Was Snowed And I Missed It

It isn't just Egypt that has me in near-obsession mode. We had a bit of a BLIZZARD and so I've been busy, being the only semi-adult in the house until later tonight. So, I was really busy and I kind of missed my new attempt to do the whole music thingy. It did give me a chance to buy some new music - the second Budos Band release among my new favorites. So, without anything like ado, a doo, or adieu, batteries to power, turbines to speed . . .

Going for the One - Yes (Live)
All Along the Watchtower - Bob Dylan (Live)
Hollow Years - Dream Theater
Festive Suite in A - Telemann
The Talking Drum - King Crimson (Live)
Sysyphus Part I - Pink Floyd
Lost Sailor - Grateful Dead (Live, Go To Nassau)
Blue and Evil - Joe Bonamassa
Adeniji - Budos Band
Maggie M'gill - The Doors

Along with the Budos Band and some other stuff, I got this song. I know it isn't cool, but it should be obvious from the past few weeks I don't really care all that much about being cool . . .

Life During War Time

I am continually amazed at the way history plays tricks on us. For most of my life, it was the Democratic Party, liberals, leftists who hated America so much they kept wanting to cut the Defense budget so that we could get taken over by the Russians.

Now, we're in the middle of a two-front (at least) war, and it is the emergent Republican majority that wants to cut the Defense Department budget by close to 20%. Let me say that again - the new conservative majority in the House of Representatives, in the midst of wars they promoted, hyped, supported, even demanded, want to cut 20% from the budget of the Department of Defense. At no time in the past four years have Democrats in either house proposed trimming anything close to that.

Now, we can certainly entertain arguments about whether or not our Defense outlays are too large. The fact that we, the US, spend more on military than the rest of the world combined, certainly at least suggests that. All the same, we have tens of thousands of our armed forces personnel in harms way; they need equipment, and the proper equipment. They need better pay. They need, perhaps, more than mere moral support, or vocal support, from so many here in the US.

We can have debates about the size, scope, and priorities of the budget for the Department of Defense, it is incumbent upon us - all of us, most especially members of Congress who hold the purse strings - to maintain our fighting force in the field so they can achieve their strategic goals, safely and securely. They need support, and that really means, where the rubber meets the road - money.

One small benefit, I suppose, is we have the spectacle of a liberal, anti-war type of guy like me insisting that our troops need to be supported and the Defense budget remain unchanged while a bunch of right-wingers in Congress want to undercut our personnel risking their lives in far flung countries.

Blizzard!

Last night I heard something I have never heard before. I have heard the wind howl plenty of times. Last night, the wind was roaring. It was vicious, without mercy or thought. As I drifted off to sleep I was more than slightly afraid concerning the very large, very old trees that surround our house in the face of all that wind and snow.

This morning I awoke to 18" of fresh snow, with drifts two and even three feet deep in places. Our little cul-de-sac has yet to be plowed. Without a snowblower, digging out the driveway has proved to be exhausting. My kids already have tomorrow off from school.

To top it off, my wife is in Orlando, Florida for a conference. In fact, she had to extend her stay an extra day because of the storm. It's eighty degrees there. She keeps telling me that. She's walking around in her shirt sleeves. Not a cloud in the sky.

She insist she feels guilty.

Would you?

Actually, I don't mind the whole blizzard thing. After all, how many does a person experience in this life? This is the first time in 15 years for me. The kids enjoyed their little romp in the snow, and with two days off school, well . . . let's just say they're very happy.

We have electricity, heat, food, coffee - all the essentials.

Except a snowblower.

Lessons From Tunisia And Egypt

A friend of mine shared this with me on Facebook, and I couldn't let it just sit there without sharing it here.

The Tunisians and Egyptians, in shaking off long-standing dictators, have inspired the downtrodden and hopeless well beyond their borders. We can learn a lot from their experiences. Here are some of the lessons:

1. Courage trumps tyranny. Courage is contagious. It just needs to be nurtured and kindled.
2. An authoritarian police state is no match for nonviolent people power. An uprising grounded in the prayers of the oppressed is a tremendous thing. Ordinary people can change their own situation.
3. Expect no support from the “international community.” In fact, at best, expect ambivalence and a steady supply of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.
4. Change can occur without strapping explosives to torsos or vehicles, without bombs or bullets.
5. Change isn’t easy or free. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of martyrs, as Thomas Jefferson once said.
6. Once fear of the tyrant and his minions is removed from the hearts of the people, the game is up.
7. Once the tipping point comes, once the paradigm shift occurs, things change rapidly and suddenly. The mighty will fall quickly. The tiger, you will find out, was made of paper after all.
8. You don’t have to wait for a Great Leader. You don’t have to wait for the Messiah. You don’t have to wait for “Salaheddin.” You just need good grassroots organizing and will. Mosques and churches help. New communication tools like smart phones and social media also help.
9. Cruel, callous regimes don’t last forever. Regimes that limit freedoms and crush dreams certainly cannot last.
10. Tyrants are not immune from revolt. Revolts are not immune from tyranny either. The gains of change must be defended against chaos, anarchy, and other bad happenings.

The author, Mas'ood Cajee, is a board member of the Muslim Peace Fellowship.

The FCIC Report II - Voices Of Dissent From Pluto

The FCIC final report was not unanimous. The four Republican-appointed members dissented from the majority report. Three of them wrote a 29 page dissent. Among their complaints was the majority was restricting the size of any dissenting reports. That's funny, because the fourth dissenter, Peter Wallison - who uses his own dissenting report's title page for purposes of self promotion as ARTHUR F. BURN FELLOW IN FINANCIAL POLICY STUDIES, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, and helpfully appends his email address to the bottom of the page - wrote 98 page, all on his own!

Right away, Wallison's dissent seems to contradict, in a fundamental way, the conclusion of the majority. Specifically, he places the onus of responsibility for the financial collapse not upon the myriad of factors sited by the majority, but to a single cause - the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

To avoid the next fi nancial crisis, we must understand what caused the one from which we are now slowly emerging, and take action to avoid the same mistakes in the future. If there is doubt that these lessons are important, consider the ongoing eff orts to amend the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA). Late in the last session of the 111th Congress, a group of Democratic congressmembers introduced HR 6334. Th is bill, which was lauded by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank as his “top priority” in the lame duck session of that Congress, would have extended the CRA to all “U.S. nonbank fi nancial companies,” and thus would apply, to even more of the national economy, the same government social policy mandates responsible for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Fortunately, the bill was not acted upon. Because of the recent election, it is unlikely that supporters of H.R. 6334 will have the power to adopt similar legislation in the next Congress, but in the future other lawmakers with views similar to Barney Frank’s may seek to mandate similar requirements. At that time, the only real bulwark against the government’s use of private entities for social policy purposes will be a full understanding of how these policies were connected to the financial crisis of 2008.

The majority, on the other hand, took a different view of the role of CRA in the financial meltdown:

In conducting our inquiry, we took a careful look at HUD's affordable housing goals, as noted above, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The CRA was enacted in 1977 to combat "redlining" by banks - the practice of denying credit to individuals and businesses in certain neighborhoods without regard to their creditworthiness. The CRA requires banks and savings and loans to lend, invest, and provide services to the community from which they take deposits, consistent with bank safety and soundness.

The Commission concludes the CRA was not a significant factor in subprime lending or the crisis.Many subprime lenders were not subject to the CRA. Research indicates that only 6% of high cost loans - a proxy for subprime loans - had any connection to the law. Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods where they were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law.(emphasis added)

Hm. On the one hand, CRA is at fault. On the other hand, CRA-regulated loans were only half as likely to default; only six percent of the subprime market was covered by CRA anyway, so its overall impact on the much larger mortgage marketplace was negligible. Seems someone has some explaining to do.

Wallison:

I believe that the sine qua non of the financial crisis was U.S. government housing policy, which led to the creation of 27 million subprime and other risky loans - half of all mortgages in the United States - which were ready to default as soon as the massive 1997-2007 housing bubble began to deflate. If the U.S. government had not chosen this policy path - fostering the growth of a bubble od unprecedented size and an equally unprecedented number of weak and high risk residential mortgages - the great financial crisis of 2008 would never have happened.

Yet, the majority addressed the issue of federal housing policy, in a paragraph immediately following their assessment of the role of CRA-regulated loans and the end of the housing boom:

Nonetheless, we make the following observations about government housing policies-they failed in this respect: As a nation, we set aggressive homeownership goals with the desire to extend credit to families previously denied access to the financial markets. Yet the government failed to ensure the philosophy of opportunity was being matched by the practical realities on the ground. Witness again the failure of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to rein in irresponsible lending. Homeownership peaked in the spring of 2004 and then began to decline. From that point on, the talk of opportunity was tragically at odds with the reality of a financial disaster in the making.(emphasis added)

So, the majority agrees with Wallison that housing policy was far too aggressive in its pursuit of ever-greater home ownership. Yet, this in and of itself hardly could have led to the other causes the majority noted as contributing causes - everything from lax corporate oversight to outright illegality, predatory lending practices, and the dismal failure of what little financial regulation was left. In this regard, citing federal housing policy, and in particular the Community Reinvestment Act as the prime, or perhaps even sole source, of the financial crisis disregards the rampant risk-taking, disregard for financial solvency and fiduciary responsibility, and outright criminality that is a part of the public record.

For this reason alone, the notion that, absent an aggressive federal housing policy - which, Wallison notes, was a bipartisan goal, pursued by Congresses and Presidents of both parties - the financial crisis was avoidable simply disregards far too many facts to be believable.

The FCIC Report I - A Theory Of The Common Good

I learned yesterday that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) final report was available on-line, including quite literally tens of thousands of pages of evidence and hundreds of hours of video testimony, both before the Commission as well as such testimony before Congressional committees as appeared relevant to the Commission's mandate, to "examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States," as laid out in the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. If it weren't for widespread unrest in the Middle East, including a successful revolution in Tunisia and an incipient one in Egypt, the report would certainly be the subject of closer scrutiny.

I decided to check it out, if for no other reasons that I could at least say I had read it, if matters related to the general topic of the financial collapse arose. With a handy link provided here, it would be easy enough to click it, or insist others do so.

What surprised me - and I was, quite pleasantly surprised - was embedded within the "Conclusions" (like the rest of the report, this is .pdf format) lies a marvelous, yet incomplete, theory of the common good that, juxtaposed as closely as it is, to the still-reigning insistence that markets are and should be autonomous spheres of activity, was refreshing. The majority report rests its conclusions - that the crisis itself was avoidable; that systemic oversight and regulatory failures created an unstable support for the financial markets; that there was a breakdown in corporate governance and risk management; that excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency increased the possibility for a coming crisis; despite repeated warnings and even clear statutory and regulatory imperatives, the government was not prepared for the crisis, and its lack of preparation led to even greater market instability; that there was a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics, both in private and public institutions; the rise of mortgage-backed investments as a tool for high-yield returns fueled ever riskier mortgage practices; the deregulation of so-called over the counter derivatives (OTC) led to their exponential growth, a specific area that contributed to overall weakness and instability; compromised by a number of factors, the credit-rating agencies failed in their independent and essential capacity as watchdogs of various financial instruments - upon a view of financial markets as a necessary, integral part of the larger economy and society of which they are a part. Their healthy, safe, and legal operations are necessary for the health of the larger polis of which they are a part. In that regard, while the majority report does hold certain public office-holders and corporate executives responsible, they also make clear that responsibility for what happened lies, too, with us as a whole. By allowing ourselves to succumb to the view that markets freed of the constraints of regulation and oversight will not only yield greater returns but will be self-regulating, we all share the blame for what was, as the first conclusion of the Commission says, a preventable, foreseeable disaster.

That short paragraph alone makes struggling through much of the report worthwhile. Here, within this official, Congressionally mandated report, is a view linking the common good, the demands of democratic governance, and the responsibilities incumbent upon all of us to ensure, as it says in the Preamble to the Constitution, domestic tranquility and enhance the general welfare.

I call it incomplete, however, because it does not go quite far enough in its criticism of the rise of the financial sector as a part of our larger economy. While investment may be necessary in some limited way to encourage business expansion, particularly as an alternative to increased private debt; with the major financial asset most Americans hold, their homes, needing to be purchased on credit, some sort of private credit should, indeed, exist; spreading, thus theoretically reducing, overall risk is a wise approach for insuring against the occasional shocks that are a part of the round of the business cycle; while all this may be true, to an extent, the exponential growth of the financial sector, and the increasing reliance upon it for a sense of the general health of the larger economy, as well as the inflated rewards offered to individuals and corporations within the financial sector for ever-greater short-term returns regardless of long-term risk raise questions about the place of financial markets within the larger economy. At one time, such were considered parasitic, earning a far greater share of wealth that was actually created through real work. The ever-increasing (computer-generated) wealth of investment firms, large banking houses, and even mortgage brokers is hardly the sign of a healthy, robust economy. It seems to me that even greater regulation and oversight, not least of which might include restricting the size and scope of the financial sector relative to the broader economy, is necessary to ensure a truly healthy society.

That being said, I have to admit I liked much of what was in the summary of conclusions.

The View From Israel

I became curious as to how Israel was reacting to the on-going incipient revolution in Egypt, so I turned to the English-language, online edition of Haaretz to discover that, by and large, the Israelis are as cautious and - let's admit it - behind the curve on events as the United States.

One article, in particular, stuck out for me. Written by Zvi Bar'el, the article's title suggests a simple-minded wonder that the no-longer huddled masses of Middle Eastern dictators are using new media and technology in support of their pursuit of revolution. The article itself, however, offers a far more broadminded, thoughtful analysis of events in the wake of the Tunisian uprising.

Up to now, the world has been divided into two camps: "complicated" countries where the government represents the public and every decision is subject to public oversight, and "easy" countries where business is conducted at the top and the public is just window dressing. The dividing line between the two has always been starkly clear. Everything north of the Mediterranean belonged to the first group and everything to the south and east to the second.

The north had political parties and trade unions, a left wing and a right wing, important intellectuals, celebrities who shaped public opinion, and of course, there was public opinion itself. In the south the division was simple. It was the distinction between moderates and extremists, meaning pro-Westerners and anti-Westerners.

If you're a Saudi king who buys billions of dollars of American weapons, you're pro-Western and therefore entitled to continue to rule a country without a parliament, one where thieves' hands are amputated and women aren't allowed to drive. If you're an Egyptian president who supports the peace process, you're pro-Western and have permission to continue to impose emergency rule in your country, jail journalists and opposition members, and fix elections.

--snip--

And all of a sudden, into the whirlwind, into the era of certainty and the lexicon in which the region's countries are neatly packaged, the Arab "street" erupts, a sophisticated street. It uses "our" methods: Facebook and Twitter - the tools of democracy we have invented - to present us with a situation of disorder. How do you defend yourself against this? This Arab street has already used these tools to depose Tunisian President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, and its ideas have gone viral. What if it manages to establish democracy in Egypt? In Yemen? Look what happened to the Shah of Iran, albeit using now-outmoded cassettes.

--snip--

We don't have to wait for other regimes to fall to understand that the revolution is happening before our very eyes. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will not fall due to demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and Yemen's ruler will also continue to rule by force. But it's a revolution of awareness and of the fundamental notions of what the Middle East is. Most importantly, we need a revolution in the way the West views the region.

Another piece, by Gideon Levy, offers a stunning indictment of authoritarianism across the Middle East, including not just the usual suspects, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as well.

Not only is the Fatah regime in Ramallah and the Hamas regime in Gaza destined to fall, but perhaps also, one day, the Israeli occupation, which certainly meets all the criteria of criminal tyranny and an evil regime. It too relies only on guns. It too is hated by all levels of the ruled people, even if they stands helpless, unorganized and unequipped, facing a big army. The first conclusion: Better to end it well, with agreements based on justice and not on power, a moment before the masses have their say and succeed in banishing the darkness.

A second, no less important conclusion: Alliances with unpopular regimes can be torn up overnight. As long as the masses in Egypt and in the entire Arab world continue seeing the images of tyranny and violence from the occupied territories, Israel will not be able to be accepted, even it is acceptable to a few regimes.

Parenthetically, I have to wonder how The New Republic's editor, the egregiously racist Marty Peretz, feels about these columns?

In any event, it seems to me these commentators, at least, understand that matters in Egypt, and perhaps across the (Arab, authoritarian) Middle East are out of the hands of the United States and Israel. Mr. Levy also seems to understand that, regardless of the regime that might replace Mubarak's, there will be little regard for Israel, considering its long-time, violent occupation of Palestinian territories, and that this might be the time to pursue a just settlement.

In all, impressive, thoughtful commentary.

In The Feet Of Father Abraham

With my attention focused on the ongoing unrest in Egypt - with Al Jazeera's coverage being superb - it was with a smile that I turned to today's lectionary reading and saw a passage from Hebrews 11.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. 9By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised.* 12Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’

13 All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, 14for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. 16But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

Right now, even now, the people of Egypt are gathering by the thousands in Cairo, in Alexandria, in Suez, in Luxor, and cities and towns across the country, defying a curfew the government cannot seem to enforce. They are demanding an end to two generations of dictatorship, half of which has been under the heel of Pres. Hosni Mubarak. They want an end to failure and widespread, abject poverty. They want an end to authoritarian rule, the arbitrary rule of self-imposed "leaders".

There has been quite a bit of talk about what the people might want as an alternative. There have been the dire warnings concerning Islamic extremists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, a small, violent terrorist group with little base of support. There have been whispers of "Iran". One journalist, as I noted yesterday, insisted this was a crisis "to be managed".

What do I see? I see a people, at the end of their collective rope. They are tired, poor, no longer afraid even of being afraid. What happens if or when Mubarak leaves? There has been little discussion of that. Perhaps, like such groups, there are a variety of thoughts, including a more rigid Islamic state. All the same, the point for the moment at least is not "What comes next?" Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands across the nation, are pouring in to streets and alleys, demanding nothing more than an end to what is. What will be? Well, they do not seem as concerned about that as those who are at a remove from their experience. Whatever may be, it seems, is far preferable to what is.

Abraham was called by God to leave his native land. He ventured forth from what was, to a new place promised by God, a place that would be his new home. He was promised an heir, indeed, heirs that would number greater than the stars in the sky. An old man, his wife barren and past child-bearing years, he took this promise, and gathered up his household and left the city of Ur, that magnificent capital of the Sumerian Empire, and traveled to a new place. He had no idea, really, what to expect. All he had was the promise of this God.

From that momentous decision - a decision, we learn from the writer of Hebrews, made in faith, without any understanding what the final outcome would really be - we have the three great faiths named in his honor. From his son Ishmael, born from a liaison with his servant woman, we have the people of Arabia; the Muslims see themselves as heirs of Ishmael, as surely as Jews and Christians count Isaac, his son with his wife Sara, as their ancestor. We are all linked by Father Abraham, whose life was one rooted in a trust in the promise of a God he did not know, in acts that had not yet occurred, and seemed impossible.

The people of Egypt, right now, even now, are demanding a new future. The present is a place of death, with no promise. They want the dead to understand that they are, indeed, dead, while they, the people, are very much alive. My fervent hope and prayer is their demand for the heavy hand of the present to be lifted is granted; that their living faith not be answered by bullets; that we not be world-wide witnesses to mass slaughter. My fervent hope and prayer is this step the Egyptian people are taking, a step in accord with Father Abraham's journey, is done with that same promise, that same hope, that same faith. May the God of Abraham be with the people of Egypt.

Not Ours

I found this post from TPM's David Kurtz to be disturbing, in particular the last bit, highlighted:

The President's brief comments from the State Dining Room of the White House suggest that he doesn't necessarily see the imminent end to Mubarak's reign -- or consider it anything close to a slam dunk that whatever might emerge post-Mubarak will be more democratic. If this were a clear choice between an authoritarian regime and a western-style democracy, it'd be a no-brainer. But it's not. It's a problem to be managed, with the sober understanding that the real world offers potential outcomes that are worse than Mubarak

The history of American "management" in crises like this is . . . well . . . it sucks, really. Furthermore, any public perception that the US is "managing" this can only hurt in the long run. After all, we have enough troubles in the Middle East; interfering in what is, quite clearly, an uprising fed by exhaustion among the Egyptian people with the lack of leadership and the success of the Tunisian revolt.

I have been following events via a live video feed from Al Jazeera's English-language broadcast online. While a mixture, as all such events tend to be, of the episodic burst of excitement and terror followed by hours-long lulls of not much at all, it is evident this is an outburst of popular resentment, and the express desire of tens of thousands of Egyptians to rid themselves not only of Hosni Mubarak, but a dictatorship in its dotage, no longer even pretending to help out the mass of the Egyptian people, 50% of whom barely exist on $2 a day, and whose social infrastructure has crumbled. While the system provides near universal education through University level, there are no jobs of any kind for those who emerge, degree in hand.

The problems Egypt faces are multiple, but it seems pretty clear there is a desire for some sort of democratic reforms to get the ball rolling for larger social and economic reforms. Any volatile situation presents dangers, to be sure. There is zero, zilch, nada indication of any kind that there is any participation by Islamic extremists, as claimed by idiotic former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. Indeed, the leaders of the Islamic Brotherhood were carted off to prison early-on in the protests; the allegations that the country has been infiltrated by any extremists, religious or otherwise, is just not borne out by the facts on the ground. Indeed, the one person many of those in the streets seem to be turning to is Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed Elbaradei, former chief UN Weapons Inspector for Iraq, who has voiced his enthusiastic support for "the youth" of Egypt, and made repeated calls for Mubarak to step down.

I do not know what the future holds in and for Egypt. Right now, there seems to be a shift from large-scale, peaceful protest to an increase in looting, at least in Cairo. This is due, in part, to the disappearance of any police presence in the capital. Yesterday, when the military was called out, they interposed themselves between the police and protesters, protecting the latter from an increase in violent force from the former. While protecting key areas of the city - from the foreign embassies and various government buildings to the Museum of Antiquities which was - briefly - entered, with some displays smashed but nothing appearing to have been stolen - much of the city is experiencing an absence of any presence of law enforcement, which can only lead to trouble.

There are also reports that water has been shut off to one of Alexandria's eleven districts.

So, the situation is still fluid - despite a lack of water in part of one city - and it is anybody's guess whether Mubarak stays or goes, the military continues to protect the people or turns on them, or perhaps the police return to their duty stations and protect the people and shops of Cairo from the depredations of looters. My most fervent wish is for the situation to resolve itself for the benefit of the great mass of the Egyptian people, desperate for a change. My next most fervent wish is that Americans, official and otherwise, allow this to evolve - or, perhaps, sadly, devolve - as a wholly Egyptian affair. This is not a "crisis" to be "managed", but a possible revolution to observe and, if successful, support as much as we can.

Egypt

The fall of the Tunisian dictatorship, covered thoroughly by Al Jazeera, has fueled the current anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt. Even as I type this, I am following Reuter's live-blogging of events, as well as Twitter.

My hope is that the United States government will step back, allow events to unfold, while perhaps quietly suggesting to Hosni Mubarak that a safe retirement in, say, New Mexico, might be in his best interest.

As I wrote on Twitter, were I the President of Syria, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and the Sultan of Oman, I might be getting just a tad nervous. Apparently there have already been street protests in Amman against King Abdullah. While I realize his mother is American, our support should always be to the people who yearn for a more vital, active role in their own governance. Even if we don't always like the results, it seems our interests lie in greater democratic freedoms.

I just pulled up a live blog from Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Their Egyptian offices have been shut down by police.

God's blessings to the people of Egypt, yearning to breathe free.

"They have crucified the sun!" - The Paganism Of Henri Lefebvre

After the liberation of France, Henri Lefebvre returned to his little village, Navareenx, in the Pyrenees. He strolled up to, then entered, the village church. After returning to Paris, he narrated his impressions which became the essay, "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside", which was included in a 1947 volume, Critique of Everyday Life. This short piece receives a close reading by Boer, and in it Boer claims that using Lefebvre's own interpretations, particularly of the dialectics of space, both as a representation and as represented, he can see hints even in Lefebvre's otherwise vitriolic, barely-concealed disgust with the Roman Catholicism of his youth, small hints of an alternative reading of the local parish as a place not just of the reification of the repression of the (rural) proletariat through the rituals and practices of the Church, but also a place full of potential protest, a "cave" he says, an underground where possible subversion can be planned.

For all this may be a possible reading, I think Boer works too hard for this conclusion. After wending one's way through Lefebvre's essay, with small excursions looking at Maurice Blondel and Joachim of Fiore, this conclusion seems to ignore some important aspects of Lefebvre's thought and life. Boer notes that Lefebvre was the founder or rural sociology in France; he further notes that, like Bloch, Lefebvre was a kind of utopian-Marxist, although of a different cast of mind. While Bloch's utopia was always not-yet, for Lefebvre (as, indeed, I think one can say of some of the writings of Marx himself) the consummation of the communist revolution, as the state withers and life and human beings are no longer alienated one from another, the result is akin more to the agrarian communism of ancient Greece, a pastoral effervescence, rather than some not-yet existent future.

The title of this post comes from a passage in the essay where Lefebvre reacts to a Celtic cross, with its circle superimposed upon the otherwise bland cruciform wall-hanging. In that instant of - what? not revelation, certainly, but perhaps anger-filled insight - clarity, we have the key to Lefebvre's protest against the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in the life of rural France. He juxtaposes the virile, sensual, life-affirming rituals of pagan religious rituals - those moments after harvest and before planting when communities would toss caution to the wind, celebrate a massive communal feast, and end in an (imagined, I think, in Lefebvre's preference for sensuality) orgy of Epicurean gluttony and Dionysian sexuality. The Church, by which he means the Roman Catholic Church, has baptized these and other rituals, robbed them of their sensuality and life-affirming celebratory core, and rendered them not just placid, but even negative. What was once a huge communal feast has become the Eucharist with its bland little wafer and barest hint of a taste of (consecrated) wine. Sexuality? The Church gives us a neutered, even emasculated Christ and the Virgin Mother. Rather than affirming life, even as these celebrations created conditions that kept rural populations perpetually on the edge of near-catastrophe, the Church has simultaneously offered a certain amount of safety to rural communities even as it strips life of those rituals and signs that would give meaning and joy to it.

With the sun crucified by the Church, we have the negation of all that Lefebvre wishes to see returned to a rural life robbed of any joy by a set of doctrines and practices that repress, even destroy, what little of real life might remain.

While it might be possible to see, buried in his description of his local church there in he Pyreneean foothills hints of possible subversion, of space reserved for clandestine gatherings in the heart of a space consecrated to the on-going repression of the rural proletariat, I believe this over-reading misses a key component of Lefebvre's approach to Marxism. It is not just liberation; it is a reconstitution, the possibility for life, particularly rural life, to be in greater accord with the rhythms and tempo of the seasons. Part of the practice of such communities is the ritualized acknowledgment of these rhythms, important touchstones for communal life. It is this ritualized harmony, this celebration of life, that Lefebvre wants to see restored. It is a deep streak of paganism that runs through at least Boer's presentation of his musings not just on the Roman Catholic Church, but his far larger project of understanding rural life.

There is little room, it seems, even for a subversive Catholicism, to take root in the heart of a community that, once it has tossed off the shackles of capitalist exploitation, would return in some manner to a more natural - and more ritualized practice - way of living.

A Gap Filler

I'm between thoughts at the moment. Reading Boer on Henri Lefebvre has left me in a bit of quandary. I really want to say . . . something . . . but there are a whole host of reasons why I keep hesitating.

The State of the Union gave me very little new to think about. Forced to sit in my car on the way to work and listen to a bunch of stupid people talk about the speech made me wonder if NPR could be prosecuted for mass murder; all that stupid, reaching out through the radio, sucking the life out of thousands of listeners, left gasping out their final breaths wishing the last thing they heard had not been Mara Liasson droning on about how much "people" care about the deficit. Had NPR decided to put Cokie Roberts in the same studio with Liasson, we might well have had the first intellectual black hole form, a stupid singularity drawing in even more American listeners, trapped and never allowed to exit.

John Boehner, pressed to say something contrary, claimed the President said nothing about "American exceptionalism". The entire speech was a paean to American exceptionalism, which means either Boehner wasn't listening or decided to say something meaningless to make conservative Republicans happy. Forced to choose, I think it is probably the latter.

Sarah Palin says the USSR won the space race. Because Democrats were in control of the country at the time, and wanted us to lose, just like they wanted us to lose in Vietnam. I made that last part up, but it makes a kind of insane sense.

Rather than winning the future, I'd much rather win the past. The future will take care of itself.

On a more serious note, I think it would be nice if discussions of the Tucson shootings would name those killed, rather than refer to them in passing. Since we still have little to no idea what prompted Jared Loughner to do what he did, for all we know the dead federal judge, or 9-year-old girl, or some other of the dead may have been his intended target. Their lives are in need of more than just a passing mention as we follow the recovery of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

I will admit that I doubt it will happen, but a Tunisian-style uprising in Saudi Arabia would be more earth-shaking, and more welcome by many (including me) than anything since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in that region of the world. Why the US would prop up a dictatorial hereditary monarchy in the face of a popular uprising may force the US to stand aside. If it should happen. The ripples from the Tunisian revolution have yet to settle.

I have great friends and family, and without a doubt the most beautiful wife and most marvelous children. I am truly a blessed man.

On that rather smarmy personal note, I think I'll sign off for now.

Putting The Hump In Hump Day - Mid-Week Music Randomness

First, a great thanks to Frank Gondo and his band, as well as Headspins, for a great Friday night treat of live music in an actual Chicago bar. Gondo's blues-rock, Headspins' pop-punk were a nice break in the humdrum of life; I particularly liked Headspins first and last numbers, "New Safe Vampires" and "Sex Camel", respectively. Many thanks to Frank, an unmet FB friend, for the good talk over a Newcastle Ale (me) and some kind of mixed drink (him) before the fun started. I must admit, though, almost getting nailed by a piece of his drummer's broken stick meant the bar was too small.

That little bit of formality out of the way, rev up those iPod/laptop/Mac gerbil-wheels, ladies and gents, and put your first ten random songs in comments, because it is through randomness that truth emerges. Seriously.

Not.

Ahem.

Dark Origins - Porcupine Tree
Afraid of Sunlight - Marillion
Wind at My Back - Spock's Beard
Duke's Travels - Genesis
Second Life Syndrome - Riverside
It's For You - Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays
Cheyenne Anthem(Live) - Kansas
Space Boogie - Jeff Beck
No Stranger - Saga
Blue Light - David Gilmour

What's something about music without, you know, music?


Steve Rothery is more than just one of the great, underrated guitarists in the world. His solos almost always have an emotional impact, which proves he's not just technically awesome, but musical. Were I to die on my way home from a Marillion show, I am quite sure it would be a happy death.

Vicarious Victimization

Kevin Drum has a nice rundown of tweets concerning a small drama yesterday at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, VA.

The only thing worse than this kind of narcissistic grandstanding is the ongoing self-righteousness of Glenn Greenwald. It isn't bad enough that he acts as if we were already a bureaucratic police state; his persistent view that his interpretation of the Constitution is the only legitimate one, while certainly an effective courtroom tactic, has turned off this former daily reader (parenthetically, were I ever in need of a Constitutional specialist in a court case, Greenwald would be the first person I would choose as an attorney; someone as big an asshole as he is would be a plus for any legal team). Specifically, it isn't so much his pose as the sole True Defender of the Constitution that bothers me as much as his nearly daily harrumph at some "outrage" that is perfectly intelligible, although perhaps not always forgivable, as part of the normal behavior of states. Whether it's the allure of power of the inertia of bureaucracies, all the things he huffs and puffs about make sense as long as one understands that no Administration has ever followed the Constitution perfectly, nor will they. Further, since there are neither penalties nor even serious political repercussions for officials violating either the law of Constitutional mandates, there is no incentive other than virtue - always in short supply among bureaucrats and officials - to do so. One would think that, as an attorney, he might just understand that.

Hamsher, on the other hand, is a different case altogether. The level of invective and sheer nastiness she used increasingly during both the 2008 Democratic primary, as well as the health care reform debate became too much for me. Further, her penchant for sheer fantasizing about the nature of the political opposition - only those who agreed with her were true Reformers; those who disagreed or took a different position were all corrupt, evil human beings - reached a level of self-parody that would have been humorous were it not for the fact that it revealed a streak of narcissism that, with events yesterday, proved that even left-wingers aren't immune from being fantasy-prone.

Pvt. Manning is being held in solitary, 23-hour lockdown. One can set aside questions regarding his hus guilt or innocence and still understand why the military might be wary of allowing him too much contact. He has admitted, publicly, that he has passed classified information to an individual, Julian Assange, who also has been quite public that his intended use of that information has not been in the best interests of the US. Whether or not Pvt. Manning is guilty of a crime, his public statements confirming his actions are to enough to make intelligible the military's decision to limit, as strictly as possible, his contacts outside detention. Furthermore, the complaint that certain visitation privileges have been revoked, well, Pvt. Manning is being held in prison. They can decide who can visit and not visit, and change their minds, for all sorts of reasons.

Some could argue that the MPs should have acted in a different manner; perhaps their superiors should have been less ham-fisted in their approach. Certainly, it has given Ms. Hamsher the opportunity to claim that she, too, like Pvt. Manning, is a victim of police-state tactics. Having one's car impounded is, obviously, right up there with being disappeared by authorities, being tortured, having one's interactions monitored and restricted by official decree. I can see why she is in such an uproar.

On the other hand, it seems to me this is a pretty clear signal to those who have lost any perspective out of sympathy for Pvt. Manning's actions that the military justice system will conduct its business in the manner it deems fit. Jane Hamsher is not a victim of a corrupt, repressive system. She was inconvenienced by parts of a system whose internal workings she has impugned, insulted, declared outside American legal and constitutional bounds. It seems to me they were sending her a bit of a message, one she might well be too dim to understand. When you bait the bear, sometimes, the bear wins.

Seek The Welfare Of The City - Stanley Haeurwas And The Problem Of Exile

After all, I have playfully used postmodern playfulness to try to remind Christians that we are in a life-and-death struggle with the world. - Stanley Hauerwas, "The Christian Difference, or Surviving Postmodernism", A Better Hope, p.36.

Jeremiah is a gloomy Gus. Reading through this prophetic book, one gets the sense that he rather enjoyed pronouncing judgment upon the evils of a people poised on the precipice of destruction, their kingdom small and weak about to face the onslaught of the Empire of Babylon. Once the catastrophe occurs, Jeremiah spends quite a bit of time comforting the people with, "I told you so".

He also offers a bit of advice to those in exile that was probably as difficult to hear as the dire warnings of imminent doom he spoke. He has a vision of two baskets of figs, and wonders what they mean. The LORD complies, starting in verse 5:

These are the words of the LORD the God of Israel: I count the exiles of Judah whom I sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldaeans as good as these good figs. I shall look to their welfare, and restore them to this land; I shall build them up and not pull them down, plant them and not uproot them. I shall give them the wit to know me, for I am the LORD; they will be my people and I shall be their God, for they will come back to me wholeheartefly.

But King Zedekiah of Judah, his officers, and the survivors of Jerusalem, both those who remain in this land and those who have settled in Egypt - all these I shall treat as bad figs, says the LORD, so bad that they are not fit to eat. I shall make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth, a reporach, a bysword, an object of taunting and cursing wherever I banish them. I shall send sword, war, famine, and pestilence against them until they have vanished from the land which I gave to them and to their forefathers.

Setting aside a whole host of questions that should properly be asked about such a text before doing the proper task of exegesis, I would, rather, prefer to offer this as a reply to Stanley Haeurwas' oft-stated desire for Christians to see themselves as those living in exile. In particular, as a reply to the all-too-often accommodated, mainline Protestant churches, their doctrinal differences getting ever fuzzier as they strive to become American Christian churches.

For Hauerwas, this has been unequivocally bad for the churches. They have lost, according to his reading of the history of Christian churches in the United States, the ability to worship, with any real meaning, any authentic prophetic or pastoral content, the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. In the essays that open A Better Hope, he goes so far as to insist that the mere possibility of being a church that does so - i.e., authentic worship of the living God - would be an ever-living thorn in the side both of secular America and the all-too-willing accommodations of a neutered Protestant bourgeoisie.

Yet, "exile", at least for Jeremiah, is hardly a state of separation. Indeed, those who are in exile, as opposed to those who have been allowed to remain behind (or who have fled to Egypt) are "the good figs", those who still find favor with God. For a people whose identity has been shaped by an attachment to The Land rooted in Divine Grace and favor, this idea that there is blessing in exile from this land must have sounded not just odd, but may even have bordered on unintelligible. All the same, Jeremiah's famous declaration, the title of this post, is of a piece with this parable of the figs. The exiles are to pray and work and live as the people of God, including praying and working for the welfare of the city in which they are held as exiles.

For Jeremiah, then, exile is not a place of struggle against. Nor is it, I should add, a place of accommodation. Rather, the people are to maintain their identity; part of that identity includes being a living community, working and praying and worshiping together, who also seek the welfare of the larger community of which they are a part. Rather than a life-and-death struggle with the world, exile is part of the people's ongoing struggle for the world.

Hauerwas has maintained, for the better part of two decades, that the Christian churches in America, in order to be Christian, need to set to one side any effort at mutual accommodation. We are not to seek the Americanization of Christianity. We are not to seek the Christianization of America. For Hauerwas, only when the churches can worship the God incarnate in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen - and there are abundant references across many writings where Hauerwas is clear this has yet to take place, at least in mainline Protestant Christianity - without reference to America, are the churches not only authentically Christian, but also authentically working for America. For Hauerwas, in other word - to use his rather odd notions of narrative - the story of exile, as the Christian's story in America, is one of a dialectic of separation and prophetic transcendence on the one hand; and immersion and pastoral care leading to transformation on the other. This rather complicated way of envisioning Christian "exile", however, ignores the prophetic insistence, recorded in Jeremiah, that, as exiles, we are those favored by God. Furthermore, as exiles, we are to live our lives as part of the larger community, seeking its welfare in the ordinary, mundane run of life.

Not only is Hauerwas' insistence that real worship of God not yet happening in the Protestant churches, far too comfortable with American life; his understanding of exile is truncated, ignoring the Divine imperative to be - borrowing the imagery from Jeremiah - good figs. This is not treason to the God of Israel, apostasy to the God of Jesus Christ. Rather, in living as both Christians and Americans, including praying and working for the welfare of America qua America, we are living out the lives of exiles. Not in struggle with, even against it. In struggle for it.